Then there is this guy that has his headphones so loud that I can hear what he listens to from 5 rows away
Free trip to hearing damage town if they aren’t already
I was on an airplane one time when someone was doing that. The flight attendant heard it and said something like, “Oh no, that’s not okay,” then figured out who it was and had them turn it down. No one even asked - she just did it. Excellent.
Mute with subtitles is fine
[Music] [Applause]This is the way.
I used to judge people for going about their daily lives with headphones on (like shopping) as being antisocial. In the last few years, I’ve come to realize they were just quicker to realize how annoying our society is and I’m increasingly likely to join them.
Recently I went to a mall and visited all the department stores. One of them had a guy playing a piano live and my first thought was “how quaint”. Then, as I sat and waited for my wife to try things on it struck me that I wasn’t hearing horrible music played over speakers - the piano was really nice. Why can’t places go back to playing relaxing music like that (even recorded)?
Theres a restaurant I go to which plays music that youd expect from a fallout game. The old folks like it cause nostalgia but a couple other folks on the younger end have said something along the lines of “I heard this in Fallout New Vegas” its great, also apparently Big Iron played once and a bunch of old bastards and younger guys sung along to it. I wish I was there for it.
IMO, there’s two main factors at play. First, the speakers in most stores suck. They have to buy them at volume (quantity, not loudness), and install them everywhere. The primary reason they have them is for paging, so they can make announcements and request that people go places. Music just gives the speakers something to do while not doing announcements.
Due to the amount of speakers they buy, and their primary purpose being for announcements, they don’t exactly buy high quality speakers. If the store has existed for a long time (maybe 10+ years), then it’s likely they’re analog, so the quality is also affected by the amps they’re using, and the cables, etc.
As long as the system can still do paging/announcements without issue, the business really doesn’t have any reason to spend money on upgrading it.
For the most part, most companies have connected these to some kind of satellite radio or music streaming system (like Spotify, but more business centric). It’s just plugged into the ancient sound amps for the analog system, often by someone who isn’t an audio expert, so levels are often all over the place, sometimes to loud and blown out, other times too quiet and details in the music are too quiet to be heard.
As long as the speakers still perform the announcements/paging that the company requires, they don’t care if the music sounds bad.
There’s a lot more to say on it for contributing factors, but the main drivers for it are not to play music. With the shift to digital and everything needing to update their music providing device, coupled with untrained people doing the connections for the new music solution to an ancient speaker system, it’s unsurprising that it sounds like garbage.
Drag shops with phonics in. Drag has autism and doesn’t need to hear 50 people’s conversations and bad pop music just to have a migraine when drag gets home. Drag does not think the grocery store is a place for social interaction anyway.
I like harsh noise music if the volume is low enough. Not an insult, I genuinely like it, but it is quite loud.
Oh my god this is so true
Makes me so irrationally angry especially when the person in question keeps cutting them off halfway through sentences
Ex used to do this all the time
At work once, some guy was watching YouTube videos in the bathroom stalls with sound on. He was also laughing at the videos. What a fucking weirdo! What kind of animal does this?
You phone shouldn’t make any sound whatsoever when you’re in public period.
It can ring and give notifications, as long as they aren’t set to something obnoxious.
It becomes obnoxious no matter what it is when they’re having a text conversation with someone and it’s going off constantly
I’m pretty old but do you know the Woody Woodpecker laugh? I used to work with a girl back before smartphones that had that as her text notification. It was the whole thing which takes like five seconds so sometimes it was just that fucking sound almost non-stop. Here it is, cursed fucking creation.
It’s kind of amazing that I haven’t really thought about Woody Woodpecker since watching the cartoons as a kid and the animation doesn’t look familiar at all other than yeah that’s the right colors, but I could hear the laugh in my head immediately on seeing the name, without having to play the audio.
That sounds like something they would do to prisoners in Guantanamo.
Well they should silence it at that point because obviously they’re paying enough attention to it and expecting responses, so they should be waiting for the vibrate if not looking at it directly.
But people don’t need to have their phone silenced at all times while in public, they just need to be attentive enough to answer and silence it. I frequently don’t even feel the vibration.
For me, if I’m actually having a conversation in public, I’ll silence my phone.
Right, but they were suggesting it should be silenced at all times, by default, even for the very first notification.
Put your phone on vibrate, you’ll survive.
No, I don’t think I will.
In the before time, the long long ago, people didn’t have a portable social media machine
Unprompted, I will tell you the most obnoxious ring tone I have ever heard. It was on the subway and a voice was suddenly loudly proclaiming: “Warning! Warning! The owner of this phone is a self-confessed binge drinker” until some douchebag picked up the call.
That is daft, but it does tickle me when someone’s ringtone is set to that “warning! It’s the wife!” one.
The worst part is that it’s just normalized enough that you can’t really call it out.
It’s normalized because it’s not a serious problem, it’s a minor, and extremely temporary annoyance the vast majority of the time.
Clearly you’ve never spent an hour+ on a bus with someone watching TikTok on a fucking Bluetooth speaker.
It’s incredibly obnoxious and there’s never a good reason for it.
Headphones are dirt cheap. Use them in public. No one has ever wanted to hear your bullshit.
Nobody should even speak in public! Or breathe my air!
A narcissistic sociopath is someone who exhibits traits of both narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) and antisocial personality disorder (ASPD). They may have an exaggerated sense of self-importance, a lack of regard for others, and a tendency to manipulate others to get what they want
They might be a literal child, as implied by their name.
I was making fun of this entire concept. If talking in public is allowed, it implies that everyone is comfortable with a person emitting a certain amount of noise. What form that noise takes is idiotic to divvy up and bitch about.
Explain to me how if you’re annoyed by music playing, why is that any more valid than someone else being mad at talking? Or someone else for whistling? Singing? Phone ringing? Vibrating? Where are your arbitrary lines?
You can’t be serious. Or you don’t spend a lot of time in public.
Most people’s conversations in public are fairly quiet. People often do get annoyed of people are having a screaming or otherwise disruptive conversation on the subway. Most humans don’t find a quiet conversation that distracting though. Hearing half a conversation annoys most people- I think it’s because the brain keeps trying to figure out what’s happening.
It’s not really “”“arbitrary lines”“”. The shared theme is “don’t distract other people in public”. Whistling fails this check. So does singing. As does a phone alarm going off. But also like most things that annoy or tolerate are arbitrary.
This is especially true if you need to hear announcements like what stop this is or that this train is going express.
Anyway, my current thinking is you’re doing some sort of “bit” as a selfish child, or you just don’t spend a lot of time in public.
If someone told me to silence my phone in public they would get laughed at. And if you persist I’ll tell you to call the cops, who will then proceed to laugh at you.
Theatres, yeah, they shouldn’t even vibrate.
Edit: you’re prefences are noted and ignored. People have been loud in public since there has been public. Get over yourselves.
Call the cops?
Yea you’re obviously a child. I mean literally based on that response.
How am I a child? Dude makes up a rule and I’m supposed to follow it? Really?
It’s not a law, and telling someone to call the cops os pointing out the absurdity of the demand.
I wouldn’t call the cops. I’d just fling it into the ocean. Who would call the cops for you then? You can’t. You have no phone.
See? We all make decisions every second to be or not to be jerks. You’re not special.
Ah, so you’ll commit assault because my phone isn’t on silent. Buds you need a reality check.
You’re assaulting others airspace and committing harassment. that isn’t your right but then suddenly everything is a crime when someone else does something to you. Pick a conviction. Narcissism isn’t an excuse.
Presumably, for such a complaint, the cops wouldn’t even bother to come to laugh at you unless they were very very bored. This is probably true in both circumstances you described. Also, I can’t speak for others, but unless detained I wouldn’t stick around most public locations long enough for someone to complain about a notification from my phone. Even if a call is received and must be answered, it seems appropriate to accept the call and leave the immediate shared area if possible. Obviously, in such circumstances as a moving bus, quickly leaving isn’t really feasible.
However, I partially agree with the person to whom you responded. Your phone shouldn’t make any media based sound (videos, music) in public. I also mostly agree with what I think you’re saying: in most circumstances, notification sounds are inoffensive. Movies are not the only exception to this but definitely are one. Laughing in the face of someone who requests quiet in a public shared area seems rude, though, and might escalate the situation.
To elaborate, recently I went to see a dental surgeon. As I approached the waiting area, my immediate thought was to set my phone to vibrate. Once I entered, however, I realized that not only was there a TV in the space; also there was an elderly couple watching TV on their phones. Not only were they doing so, not only were they watching something different from what was on the TV, not only were they watching their media at BLARING volume, but they were also watching vastly different content. In this circumstance, notifications could be - reluctantly - forgiven, but their blasting and conflicting media made it very difficult to concentrate on filling out my paperwork.
I’m too much of a wimp to have approached them, but in that circumstance I think it would have been appropriate to ask them to silence their media and would have only required a vague awareness of the existence of others for them to have done so without prompting.
Though the cops, if they came, would likely still have just laughed.
An aside: as soon as the presumed wife left the waiting area, the likely husband shut off his media. I don’t know what that means, but wanted to mention it.
No u.
It interferes with public emergency announcements so there should be some clear enough airspace for it.
What if, what if, what if. The world is noisy.
That’s just an excuse to be an asshole. Not to consider. This is how sociopaths reason.
If you are in public, like a bus, restaurant, store, public space, etc.
Your phone shouldnt make any fucking noise at all besides ringing and the text ping noise.
And if you’re gonna answer it, don’t put it on speakerphone, and respect teh fact that everyone within 300 feet of you doesnt want to be party to your fucking phonecall.
No ringing or text ping noise either. Use vibrate like a civilized human.
ringing is fine as long as you dont have an obnoxious 4 minute ring tone
Worst thing about someone watching a reel out loud is you hear the same 15 second sound bite 30 times while they’re reading the comments.
or 5-second disconnected bits while they scroll
Oh no oh no oh nononono
That’s my wife, then after like 2 minutes she tells me to watch it.
I JUST HEARD IT 23 TIMES!
Some other things to add:
- Stand left, walk right on escalators and moving walkways
- Do not walk more than two abreast, and be aware that there may be people behind you who want to walk faster.
My main gripe with society is that everyone else is in their own little worlds and I’m stuck in the real one dealing with them all.
Stand left, walk right on escalators and moving walkways
This may be region-specific. In my area, I generally see it the other way around. But unless you’re the only person, it’s usually pretty clear which side to stand.
Yeah, I got it backwards. Unless you’re in a former Commonwealth country and you drive on the left
Treat yourself like a car and park - I see too many people just stopping in the middle of wherever to check their phone. It’s not hard to take a quick glance and find a spot off to the side. They should teach this stuff in schools.
Stand left, walk right on escalators and moving walkways
This will get you killed in the UK. People would cheer.
I swear to god, please please please do not blast your fucking music, even if it is rad like ratm, on the walking trail. No one likes it and it makes you look like an asshole and I have to glare at you instead of giving you a friendly wave.
I see a few cyclists doing that these days on the bike trails. Some of these absurd $10K+ bicycles even have speakers built into them. I guess it’s slightly less obnoxious since a bicycle will pass a walker or runner very quickly, but it’s still dickhead behavior. Even worse than music, though, is people who blast fucking preachers.
Blasting preachers is a special sort of asshole behavior I never encountered or considered before. I bet they think they are saving souls.
The dude definitely had the smug look of the saved walking amongst the damned. I don’t think he cared about saving souls at all, just doing his version of virtue signalling.
Hiked up to a ridge today. Guy up there smoking and playing a radio. Ugh.
I completely agree.
But.
I fucking hate how I can’t read about anything any more. Especially instructional things.
It’s getting to the point that if there’s something I want to learn about or research, I have to watch a video. And of course, I probably didn’t bring headphones, because I wasn’t planning on listening to or watching anything.
this is what closed captioning is for, ya know and the other thing
I need headphones regularly for learning languages (Duolingo), learning coding, learning about physics etc So there are always Bluetooth headphones in my small bag.
There’s no life without them
Most yt channels have captions and transcripts. If you really are that desperate to learn how to install a French drain while on the bus, just grab the transcript and whack it into chatgpt to get an article version.
Then you wait until you get home or to an otherwise appropriate venue. No one wants to hear a tutorial they didn’t ask for about putting up drywall on their commute home or in the grocery store.
This is not really true in my experience. The vast majority of instructional videos and video essays are just repackaging a text resource, often just the list of references from Wikipedia. I think you’re just falling for the veneer of professionalism that makes YouTubers popular, but remember it doesn’t actually mean they know what they’re talking about any more than a random forum poster. There are of course exceptions, but the glut of instructional videos is just because they’re profitable, not because they’re actually full of unique knowledge.
That’s was pisses me off ever since I started to go by train instead of my car for environmental reasons to work. Like what happend that people don’t understand the general politeness anymore. We used to be gentle to each other and that means that I don’t force other people to listen to my videos as well.
The last time a young mother gave her little 3 year old child an iPad to watch videos. I’m not sure what pissed me off the most, that it was with sound or that the mother gave an iPad to her kid, because it’s well studied how bad phones and tablets influence kids.
I wish I could by train to work. I honestly wouldn’t even mind the noise if I had the option to take a train. I bring my noise cancelling headphones everywhere so I doubt I would even hear it.
Man, my brother is the worst for this. Has multiple pairs of headphones, usually at least one on his person, and STILL will blast his Instagram reel on speaker as if everyone around him wants to hear his doomscrolling and brainrot memes
We as a society have given up on doing literally anything to shame or punish people who are rude selfish assholes. In fact a large contingent of society seems to celebrate selfishness now. Considering how your actions impact others is something I feel like capitalism has destroyed by showing the world that the only thing you should value is getting ahead by any means necessary, just pretend your actions have no consequences and sell your soul and you too can definitely
neverbe rich too. I truly believe seeing this play out in real life for our entire lives has just shown people considering other people is a recipe to be worse off than being selfish. Capitalism is a plague.
